Emoticons
This is a list of common emoticons. Western style Traditionally, the emoticon in Western style is written from left to right, the way one reads and writes in most Western cultures. Thus, most commonly, one will see the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and mouth. To more easily recognise them, the reader should tilt their head toward their left shoulder (or occasionally toward their right shoulder if the "top" of the emoticon is toward the right). Common examples East Asian style Users from East Asia popularized a style of emoticons that can be understood without turning one's head to the left. These emoticons are usually found in a format similar to (*_*), where the asterisks indicate the eyes, the central character, usually an underscore, the mouth, and the parentheses, the outline of the face. A large number of different characters can be used to replace the eyes, which usually is where the emoticon derives its emotive aspect (contrasting the Western emoticons' emoting through the mouth). The emphasis on the eyes is reflected in the common usage of emoticons that use only the eyes, e.g. ^^. Characters like hyphens or periods can replace the underscore; the period is often used for a smaller, "cuter" mouth or to represent a nose, e.g. (^.^). Alternatively, the mouth/nose can be left out entirely, e.g. (^^). The parentheses also can often be replaced with Brackets, Curly brackets or braces, e.g. {^_^}. Many times, the parentheses are left out completely, e.g. ^^ or oO. A quotation mark ", apostrophe ', or semicolon ; can be added to the emoticon to imply apprehension or embarrassment, in the same way as the anime sweat drop. Many other characters can be appended to also indicate arms or hands, e.g. <(^_^)> or ⊂( ﾟ ヮﾟ)⊃. Microsoft IME 2003 (Japanese) or later supports the use of both forms of emoticons by enabling Microsoft IME Spoken Language Dictionary. Simple examples Complex examples Western use of East Asian style English-language anime forums adopted those emoticons that could be used with the standard ASCII characters available on western keyboards. Because of this, they are often called "anime style" emoticons in the English-speaking Internet. They have since seen use in more mainstream venues, including online gaming, instant-messaging, and other non-anime related forums. Emoticons such as <(^_^)>, which include the parentheses, mouth or nose, and arms (especially those represented by the inequality signs < or >) also are often referred to as "Kirbies" in reference to their likeness to Nintendo's video game character,(Nintendo). The parentheses are usually dropped when used in the English language context, and the underscore of the mouth may be extended as an intensifier, e.g. ^____^ for very happy. 2channel style The Japanese language is usually encoded using double-byte character codes. As a result there is a bigger variety of characters that can be used in emoticons, many of which cannot be reproduced in ASCII. Most kaomoji contain Cyrillic and other foreign letters to create even more complicated expressions analogous to ASCII art's level of complexity. To type such emoticons, the input editor that is used to type Japanese on a user's system is equipped with a dictionary of emoticons, after which the user simply types the Japanese word (or something close to it) that represents the desired emoticon to convert the input into such complicated emoticons. Such expressions are known as Shift JIS art. Users of 2channel in particular have developed a wide variety of unique emoticons using obscure characters. Some have taken on a life of their own and become characters in their own right, like Mona (ASCII art). Basic examples This information was copied from a free source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_emoticons [[Category:Featured Articles]